United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has named a five-member panel led by Italian judge Antonio Cassese to investigate whether genocide has taken place in Sudan's Darfur region.
Created at the request of the UN Security Council in a US-drafted resolution, the commission will also look into reports of widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the western Sudanese area.
Panel members agreed to submit their findings in three months to Mr Annan, who would then report to the council, a UN spokeswoman said yesterday.
More than 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and up to 50,000 killed by fighting in Darfur since a rebellion broke out in February 2003, according to the United Nations, which calls the area the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The US government believes genocide is taking place in Darfur, and two top UN human rights watchdogs told the council this month war crimes had probably occurred on "a large and systematic scale" there.
The Khartoum government blames the violence largely on anti-government rebels, although it has agreed to rein in nomadic Arab militias it is widely believed to have armed. The area's settled African residents accuse the so-called Janjaweed militias of widespread murder and rape and pillaging and torching their villages.